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Home Fires: Narrative and Memory at War

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

This is the last of a five-part series, “Retelling the War,” in which veterans discuss how books, movies and other tales of combat shaped their perceptions of themselves and of war.

I am aware that two war movies, “The Hurt Locker” and “The Messenger,” have received multiple nominations for the Academy Awards. Though I’ve enjoyed war movies in the past, I haven’t seen either of these.

I’ve stopped watching movies about our current wars for the same reason I don’t like recounting my scariest moments for voyeuristic friends. I am protective of my memories and don’t want them crowded out.

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People seem impatient when I choose to talk about playing volleyball with interpreters, drinking tea with warlords, training police, or dredging irrigation canals. It’s as if you lack authenticity if you talk about anything other than killing or being killed.

The expectation bores into your memory, and you struggle to distinguish how you felt from how you are expected to feel. Often, it feels easier to surrender to expectation. There is truth in what Isaac Babel wrote in his story, “My First Fee”: “A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”
I feel the reality of my experiences seeping through my fingers as my own life tries with all its might to resemble one of two stories: that of hero or victim. I can be the hero who in the face of danger mustered all the old truths of the heart, or, and perhaps simultaneously, I can be a well-intentioned victim of circumstance forced to commune with death through the moral ambiguities of war.

Whatever a veteran’s faults, they are all excused with four simple words: I’ve been to war.

We roll out a red carpet for such victims. Whatever a veteran’s faults — irritability, boorishness, aloofness, alcoholism, drug use, self destruction — they are all excused with four simple words: I’ve been to war. For many, the effects are genuine, sure, and we should help them. I do not want to dismiss anyone’s suffering. I do, however, want to acknowledge the seductive power of the red carpet of victimhood, and life bending to resemble a well-crafted story.

I’ve listened to a reading of “The Iliad” from nine cassette tapes three times. Its heroes were legitimately distinguished by valor and prowess in specific opposition to those who stayed with the ships during battle. The rest were neither victim nor hero, but soldiers doing their jobs and shouldering their burdens — unglamorous labor, homecoming and all.

I remember Iraq, 2003-04. This was before the swarms of reporters left in search of riper piles. The well-crafted story then, as now, involved the struggles of well-intentioned soldiers, though back then it contrasted more starkly with how I think I remember feeling.

Morale in my unit was generally high, especially early on, and I resented the efficiency with which reporters seemed to sniff out the young soldier among us who was having a hard time. I resented the constant parade of them on the news.

The reports were honest, of course, but as I’ve written before, the problem with war narratives isn’t lying. The problem is there’s too much truth. Everything you’ve ever heard or suspected about armed conflict is likely true. The enterprise is so vast that writers, myself included, can choose whichever truths support a particular thesis.
So yes. We struggle. We struggle famously, and probably more so as our wars approach the decade mark.

But who will tell the story of those who don’t struggle to adjust? Is there space in our consciousness for those who enjoy themselves? For those who choose to return to do similar work as contractors for a salary three times as high? Those who return because they didn’t get enough action? Who will admit that many of us are capable of facing combat? I never met anyone emerging from an intense firefight who wanted to go back, but those who folded under the pressure were the exception, not the rule. Who will admit that some of us even revel in it? And if such statements are made, who will listen?

I’d be kidding myself to think “The Iliad” isn’t a whitewashing — propaganda even — for the Greeks.

Although it puts me and many of my personal friends in a flattering light, I fear the narrative of the reluctant, well-intentioned soldier because, along with similar reverence for all things military, it seems a requisite for endless war. The misguided motives of empire hide behind the sympathetic portrayal of its servants. I also know, as we all probably do but hesitate to admit, that many of us servants were far from reluctant.

Anyone who’s been over there understands how, toward the end of a deployment, soldiers who haven’t gotten enough action begin volunteering for dangerous missions. They don’t want to talk about playing volleyball and dredging irrigation canals when they return home. They want to say they’ve seen things gentler people could not possibly understand.

Similarly, if our wars ever draw to a close, there will be a headlong rush within the ranks to get over there and earn combat patches and action badges because such decorations are good for careers. They are good for telling stories to grandchildren too, though I don’t think prospective grandparents planning far in advance should worry about missing the opportunities of Iraq or Afghanistan. Since we ended the inconvenient practice of declaring our wars, the United States has waged one every decade. There will be no shortage of opportunities to see things your civilian friends couldn’t possibly understand.

These more selfish impulses are no less real and no less human than those behind heroism and victimhood, which are so much more readily embraced. Excluding them, as most war movies do, whitewashes reality.

While I like the spare granting of hero or victim status in “The Iliad,” I’d be kidding myself to think it isn’t also a whitewashing — propaganda even — for the Greeks. Unglamorous labors are merely alluded to, while excessive descriptions of bloody, glorious combat go on for pages.

My favorite war narrative is Thucydides’s “History of the Peloponnesian War.” The two-and-half-millennium-old narrative does not ignore selfish pettiness, opportunism, false bravado, naïve adventure seeking, and is more familiar to me than many accounts of our wars being peddled today.

I resent the thanks I occasionally get because it is given without knowing whether I commanded an infantry platoon or a desk, whether I’d been a good leader or a bad one, and I resent the pity because, all told, I’ve benefited from all the military has taught me. Occasionally, I’m tempted to walk the red carpet of victimhood so often unrolled at my feet. For a split second, I even wonder if it isn’t deserved, and this scares me. I feel my memories bending to accommodate the world.

Wars, like everything else, are replaced by the telling of them.

Roman Skaskiw served as an infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq. After three years of civilian life, he was recalled from the inactive reserve and deployed with a Provincial Reconstruction Team to Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. He lives in Iowa City.

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Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. The project originated in 2007 with a series of personal accounts from five veterans of the Iraq war on their return to American life. It now includes dispatches from veterans of wars past and present.